My stepdaughter and I circle round and round. <br />You see, I like the music loud, the speakers <br />throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether <br />Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so <br />each bass notes is like a hand smacking the gut. <br />But my stepdaughter disagrees. She is four <br />and likes the music decorous, pitched below <br />her own voice-that tenuous projection of self. <br />With music blasting, she feels she disappears, <br />is lost within the blare, which in fact I like. <br />But at four what she wants is self-location <br />and uses her voice as a porpoise uses <br />its sonar: to find herself in all this space. <br />If she had a sort of box with a peephole <br />and looked inside, what she'd like to see would be <br />herself standing there in her red pants, jacket, <br />yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject <br />for serious study. But me, if I raised <br />the same box to my eye, I would wish to find <br />the ocean on one of those days when wind <br />and thick cloud make the water gray and restless <br />as if some creature brooded underneath, <br />a rocky coast with a road along the shore <br />where someone like me was walking and has gone. <br />Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego, <br />leaving turbulent water and winding road, <br />a landscape stripped of people and language- <br />how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.<br /><br />Stephen Dobyns<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/loud-music/
